DBWI: Elvis Presley Does Not Re-enlist

Shortly before he was scheduled to be discharged from the United States Army in 1960, Sergeant Elvis Presley made an announcement that shocked the world. He announced that he will give up his singing career, and remain in the Army. And the rest is history.

What would have happened if Elvis decided to return to civilian life and resumed his career in show business? Would he still have been able to have a string of hits and maintained his title as King of Rock and Roll?

Discuss.
 
He wouldn't be the maytr he is today. But being killed in the war was a good way to make him the big Anti war icon.
 
Bob Dylan wouldn't have been declared the new King (or Prince) of Rock and Roll as easily as he was. And maybe the British Invasion wouldn't have gone as well as it did, and the Beatles could have had a bit of competition in the industry.

Then again Elvis' singing career was starting to stagnate anyway and he was becoming more an actor than a singer with the films he did. So perhaps history would have gone not too differently. History would definitely have been different for Elvis though. He would probably fart around the music industry for a few years, probably continue not to produce albums for a while as he had come to do circa the era and become more an image than an artist, and if he didn't make any comeback (though I think he might have), he would still have had the royalty checks.

And, he would probably still be alive. Though, given allegations in recent years that his death was the result of pill popping as much as it was a Vietcong bullet (if not totally), maybe he would have died at some time (1970's or 1980's?).
 
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By 1960, as pre-recorded songs from Elvis kept trickling into the charts, his influence was already fixed. His later efforts only joined him to the new, slower-moving mainstream of music.

Elvis was the cutting edge from 1956 to 1958. By the sixties, he was part of the mainstream and that mainstream would have been very much the same if he had stayed in the army.
 
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